Tag Archives: Kami no Shizuku

There’s been a lot of good happening in my professional career lately.

I’ve been pretty busy, so if you’ve noticed a drop in the number of posts, it’s mostly because it was what I like to call “copy-edit hell week”, which has stretched into 3 weeks now. Sooner or later (please, sooner, please!) that copy-edit hell will go away and break into a fresh new burst of busy!

But during all this hustle and bustle, I’ve gotten a raise from one client and been asked to work for another manga publisher. It’s amazing news and a huge relief to me. I was debating moving away from manga editing slightly by getting a part-time job. It’s not that this line-of-work is a deliberate money thing for me, but I just want to keep doing it AND pay my bills. Plus it’s great to re-affirm that I can do freelance manga editing as a career because it seems like such a crazy pipe dream at times.

On top of that, Hetalia Axis Powers vol. 2 has been on the New York Times bestselling manga list for a number of weeks now, bringing vol. 1 along for the ride and back into the top 10. That always makes me happy for the simple reason that it’s a title that I’ve worked on and the first manga I’ve worked on to make it to the list!

Speaking of Hetalia, I actually knew Tokyopop had licensed it before the rest of the general public did (even before TP’s not-so-subtle Twitter hints that they’d picked it up.) Of course, I found this out when I technically wasn’t working or interning for Tokyopop, but just happened to be visiting the office. When I put two and two together (there was a lot of Hetalia paraphernalia about), I was quickly and sternly warned not to mention it to anyone.

It was the first time I had known a publishing secret. It was a little scary, actually, because anyone who knew anything about popular manga knew that Hetalia was a huge phenomenon. I hadn’t gotten into the series yet because the only way to read it was obviously illegal, but I was pretty stoked that the company had snagged such a popular manga. It was big! It was exciting! Fangirls would scream! I couldn’t help but hope for it’s success considering that Tokyopop had drastically downsized the previous year. (This was in 2009.) It’s so cool to see it succeed like I hoped it would! A lot of people in the office were waiting with bated breath to see if Hetalia would be picked up by the American fandom.

To some, it might seem a little silly to keep a license announcement secret. After all, letting fans know sooner rather than later will only result in excited otaku and good press for the company, right? Wrong! It’d be one thing if it was a really minor leak, like when Deb Aoki recently spilled the beans on Kami no Shizuku being licensed by Vertical Inc. just before an episode of ANNCast was set to break the news. The result was pretty much only some grumbling and the release of that ANNCast a little earlier than expected because Vertical pretty much had the license set up already.

But a premature license announcement can have a lot of disastrous results. If the news got out too early, it could displease the Japanese rights holders and put negotiations on shaky ground. Or a publisher could be unprepared to release the information because publishing dates and technicalities aren’t set in stone. This has happened before, most recently when Vertical announced No Longer Human a little too early, had to retract the statement last October and couldn’t confirm the license again until last month. Obviously, no one but the folks at Vertical know what happened after their first, mistaken announcement, but I can’t imagine it was pleasant to deal with.

Lastly, retracting or losing a license due to an unintended, early announcement isn’t going to get any favorable reaction from fans. Over all, it looks terribly unprofessional for the company or whomever let the secret slip early. That’s really serious, since the loss of a reliable reputation can cost a publishing company future licenses they may want. For an individual worker, it means a not just loss of their reputation, but a potential blacklisting.

So there you go, manga publishing secrets are serious business. It’s always best to listen to official license announcements by the publishers themselves, since, as the manga blogging community has witnessed, sometimes a book popping up on Amazon doesn’t always mean a title is going to be release when the listing says.

So Deb Aoki, the manga guide for About.com, accidentally let slip tonight that Vertical Inc. licensed Kami no Shizuku (Drops of God) on Twitter after recording a session of ANNCast. Unfortunately she deleted the tweet after realizing the official announcement hadn’t been made yet. Fortunately this spurred Zac Bertschy, Anime News Network’s executive editor, to post the announcement sooner, sending manga fans all over Twitter into a joyous frenzy when they realized Princess Knight was also picked up.

And now we can expect the first volumes of Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight, Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimito’s Kami no Shizuku and Usumaru Furuya’s No Longer Human to be on shelves this fall.

I was lucky enough to win a bid for the first two Kodansha bilingual editions of Princess Knight last year off of eBay. Despite the fact that the purchase set me back $50, I felt it was well worth my money. No doubt I’ll be dropping more cash for the Vertical edition later this year.

Daniella Orihuela-Gruber got into comics as a kid in the book section of a department store. Then she fell in love with manga in Egypt. Now she works as a manga editor, writes this blog and is way too geeky about manga all the time.